Imagine yourself in this case scenario. You are a system administrator for a supercomputer and or web server. The air conditioning goes down and you are standing here in a room full of powerful computers that are about to overheat, threatening a halt to your operations, thousands of dollars lost, lost data and the need to replace some very expensive computer systems.

What are your options:

In some cases servers are set to shut down when the air reaches a temperature of 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Another possible solution is to bring in a bunch of large fans and spend the next several hours sweating it out hoping your servers don’t melt.

A new solution

The team at Purdue University have developed a program that will reduce the amount of heat produced by servers. This solution comes at a cost of a reduction in your systems performance of 70-80%. Basically this program deliberately slows your computer down to keep it from overheating.

The program is available from FolioDirect for 250 dollars, which is a fragment of the cost of replacing a supercomputer.  Also as you would expect with any quality software available for the supercomputing environment, this program will run on many distributions of Linux.

I stumbled across this video just today on youtube. Truth happens gives examples of other technologies and truths and how those technologies or truths which were rejected by some and later became the standard. Such as the telephone and the radio just to name a couple. The video finishes up by shining some light on the Linux community.

Here is a link to the truth happens youtube video.

Apple has created some notable products. But for me, if I am going to spend my hard earned money on hardware and software, then I plan to use it however I see fit. That is the difference between the technology provided by the open source community versus what has been made available in locked down proprietary formats.

Apple has applied for a patent related to technology that will enable them to disable various features of jail broken devices, this action will result in even less freedom for Apple users. Either use what Apple gives you or many of your devices features will be disabled. Those not content with the walled garden approach and who want to be able to make full use of their computers and gadgets will find that their are many alternatives available.

Apple is not the only non windows computing solution.

For your desktop there is Ubuntu. For your smartphone there is Meego and Android. For your mp3 player you will find that there is a wide variety of alternatives available that cost only a fraction of the price of an iPood.

Do you remember when you could not go anywhere on the web that had anything to do with Linux without getting bombarded with steam is coming to Linux and steam is definitely coming to Linux and tech writers came up with just about every title to give this story to get their little piece of traffic from this story. It was a big deal.

The truth has came out. And the developers behind steam have no intention of developing a version of steam for Linux. This is very disappointing to the Linux community.

Valve’s Doug Lombardi simply told GI.biz:

“There’s no Linux version that we’re working on right now.”

A lesson for tech writers

There were many reasons why the community believed this was about to happen. I read many of the articles and it all made sense. But, at least at this point in time the company has no plans to release a Linux version of steam. Sometimes it is better to just wait until a company releases actual information instead of trying to rush a story out in an effort to be on the cutting edge of tech information.

The first thing you will need to do is install the latest ffmpeg 0.6 and it’s dependencies here is a link to a posting that may come in handy for the Ubuntu users out there.

Once ffmpeg is setup you may find as I did that it works best from the command prompt. I will try to make this as newbie friendly as possible.

This simple command will take care of converting a wide variety of formats into webm which is youtube compatible:

ffmpeg -i source.avi -f webm -vcodec libvpx destination.webm

How this code works

ffmpeg -i is the beginning of the code source.avi is just an example of a possible name of a video file that your are converting so that part of the code actually just represents the name of the video you are going to encode. Also you will need to include the file path that leads to the video so if your file was stupidvideo.ogv and it was setting in your /home/video directory then your code would be:

ffmpeg -i /home/video/stupidvideo.ogv -f webm -vcodec libvpx destination.webm

destination.webm is the name of the output file. So if that is what you want the file to be called when it is finished then you can just leave it like that. But if you would prefer stupidvideo.webm then your code would look like this:

ffmpeg -i /home/video/stupidvideo.ogv -f webm -vcodec libvpx stupidvideo.webm

From my experience the output file has always been placed in the home directory. By output file I am simply referring to your video after it has been converted.

Once you have converted your file you can play your webm file back by opening it in Chrome which provides support for webm video.

After you have tested the video out and all is well, then you should be able to successfully upload the webm video to youtube.

Check out my youtube video of the compiz desktop in Linux.

Using a little program called recordmydesktop and devede as well as Pitivi editor I just completed a youtube video featuring some of the awesome effects available

Here is a link to check out my Linux desktop with Compiz.

Oracle’s lawsuit against Google has unleashed a storm of back lashes from the Linux community. This back lash will include a loss of coding and development support from key developers in the open source community. One KDE developer is already looking to hasten the demise of JVM.

Richard Dale brought his thoughts and ideas regarding Oracle’s lawsuit to the surface in a posting entitled Defending Free software against Oracle’s attack. This posting can be found at http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/4309

In his posting he suggested some ideas on how the developers should respond, by in his words hastening the demise of Oracle:

“Although I don’t really like Java much, Arno Rehn has been thinking of doing some Java bindingsrecently for Qt and I’ve been wondering if we could base them on the Android Dalvik VM and target them at the MeeGo environment. That way we could do our bit for hastening the demise of the regular JVM or the useless MIDP cut down Java environment, and help to make Dalvik the ubiquitous choice for running applications written in the Java language on small devices. The most interesting technical problem might be how to integrate the Android ‘Zygote’ process starter with the MeeGo DBus driven equivalent. Another interesting problem is that Dalvik supports JNI but Dan Bornstein mentioned that there was a more efficient mechanism for make native code calls. Maybe as the Smoke way of doing language bindings doesn’t involve a JNI call for every method in the C++ api being wrapped, we could make use of that.”

End of Quote

The irony is that much of Oracle’s business is tied up with the open source community, such as with openoffice.org and numerous other products and services. Whether Oracle wins the lawsuit or not, their company stands to lose much support, business and money. Oracle could be bringing about it’s own removal from the market place.

I am definitely wanting this product, made by postertext.com. It is a poster of Tux coordinated with Source Code from the Linux Kernel. This poster is available from postertext.com for $31.99.

This poster contains source code from the Kernel version 2.6.34.1:

• sched.c
• sched_clock.c
• sched_cpupri.c
• sched_cpupri.h
• sched_debug.c
• sched_fair.c

Nero Linux 4 brings support for all optical disk including, Blue Ray disc support. The company that produces Nero Linux 4 claims that this is the only product to support blue data laser burning in Linux. The downloadable version of Nero Linux 4 is available for 19.99.

This latest version of Nero for Linux includes a host of new features:

• NEW! easy, wizard-style user interface for guided burning with Nero Linux Express 4
• Features the best professional burning solution, Nero Linux Burning ROM
• NEW! Advanced settings and options for burning CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray Discs ISO 9660 file system support for Blu-ray
• NEW! BD Defect Management (enable/disable)
• NEW! lightweight Linux bootloader disc support
• SmartDetect automatic drive detector
• NEW!Enhanced audio format support for AIFF and MusePack
• Support from FreeDB